User Mailing

ICHEC mail #20

Posted: 2006-03-31

Dear ICHEC users,

Contents:

1. Transition to the full national service
2. First call for Class A applications
3. Changes in scheduling policies, charging and accounting
4. Changes on login nodes
5. 2nd ICHEC User Group Meeting
6. IAHPC workshop

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1 – Transition to the full national service
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As indicated in earlier mailings, the transitional service (TS) will come to an end on 31st May 2006. Access will be discontinued for anyone not supported under the Full National Service (FNS). FNS applications have been accepted from 1st February, with a total of 12 Class C and 4 Class B projects already accepted to date (http://www.ichec.ie/research). A further 4 Class B applications are currently being reviewed by the Scientific Council.

A number of measures have been put in place to incite potential applicants to apply early rather than wait until the end of the TS. Thus,

- resources granted to FNS projects will not be charged until 1st June 2006, so in effect benefiting from the same "free for all" policy as TS projects.

As the Scientific Council will not be able to process a very large number of applications within a short period, we strongly recommend potential PIs to submit their application to the FNS as soon as possible (instead of waiting until May). Failure to do so may result in delays in the review process, and subsequent breaks of access (for late applicants) when the TS is discontinued.

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2 – First call for Class A applications
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ICHEC is now inviting proposals for Class A ("Grand Challenge") applications.

Class A applications will typically be submitted by consortia concerned with "Grand Challenge" problems, and are expected to yield high-impact scientific publications. These groups will require resources representing a substantial fraction of the centre's resources over a long period. As such, we only anticipate supporting a total of 7 such projects over the lifetime of the service.

Applicants considering applying for a Class A project are expected to have a good knowledge of the characteristics of the code(s) which they intend to use – such as scalability properties – before writing their proposal. For this reason, applicants who are not in such a position are advised to first apply for Class C access in order to undertake a basic scalability and performance study. Such an exercise is essential to provide an accurate estimate and a proper justification of the resources requested. If you intend to use packages supported by ICHEC, you may contact us via the helpdesk as we can assist you in this task.

Applications will be peer-reviewed to international standards, and applicants will be notified of the outcome of their application within 8 weeks of the closing date. The deadline for application is Tuesday 2nd May, 9am.

A load balancing system is now in operation on the login nodes to dynamically start user sessions on the login node with the lowest load. Any new login carried out within 10 minutes of the original session will be directed to the same host.

Note that you may bypass this mechanism by specifying the login node's hostname in place of the generic address walton.ichec.ie, e.g.:

ssh walton.ichec.ie

will log you on one of the three login nodes

ssh l2cu27.ichec.ie

will log you on this specific login nodes, irrespective of its current load. The two other login nodes are l2cu28 and l2cu29.